Service providers (e.g., wireless, cellular, etc.) and device manufacturers are continually challenged to deliver value and convenience to consumers by, for example, providing compelling network services. An example network service is providing current traffic information for navigation systems. While map information is rather static, changing slowly over decades; traffic information is dynamic, sometimes changing dramatically over minutes. For example, congestion can develop quickly on certain road segments because of a particular accident. The dynamic content is also very dense; a map image with traffic information combined typically involves tens of thousands of picture elements (pixels) each comprising dozens of bits of information.
Providing current traffic information to consumers of navigation systems is a great challenge. For example, one traffic service may comprise millions of road segments and tens of thousands of traffic updates to be used to generate map images of millions of bits to be sent to hundreds of thousands of consumers. The wireless device used by each consumer is typically limited in processor, storage, bandwidth, display, and battery power capacity; so, much processing is done on the service provider equipment. Providing such a service can expend much of the resources on the equipment assigned to the service, clog valuable bandwidth in communications networks and become prohibitive as the number of consumers increases. Often, a consumer device that requested the traffic information stands idle, waiting for a response from the service and thus wasting computational resources on the consumer device.